Farm livestock is exposed to disease as all living creatures are. The economical pressure of disease in farm livestock however, is enormously high.
Livestock diseases are usually detected (and defined) by personal inspection by the farmer or by the veterinarian—once a vast majority of the group is infected. A group may refer to a poultry flock, a group of hives gathered in one location, a herd of grazing sheep or cattle, a fishpond etc. This is the case for livestock groups containing a large number of individuals, in which the individual is “anonymous”—such as poultry, bees, grazing cattle or sheep, fish and others.
Because of the anonymity of the group members, health condition of individuals is not monitored—only that of the group—and diseases are detected too late. To minimize risk and losses, farmers usually rely on prophylactic treatments and massive usage of medications. This pattern of health control results in late detection of disease outbreak—sometimes by days or even weeks—leading to higher morbidity and mortality rates, consequently to higher damages and costs.
Poultry farming is industrialized in most countries. House temperature and humidity are automatically controlled. Feeding, watering and even vaccination and medication are delivered automatically.
Human presence inside the chicken house is deliberately kept at minimum and human inspection of the flock's productivity and health are remote and scarce.
These inspections are carried out once a day or two by the farmer or his employees and once a week or two by the veterinarian. Inspections are visual. Due to the large number of chickens in the flock (up to 200,000 per house of broilers), morbidity is usually only noticed once a large portion of the flock shows significant symptoms of a certain disease, or once mortality rate is high enough to be noticed. By that time, up to 100% of the flock could be infected, treatment required is massive and the economical losses caused by reduction of production and mortality are heavy.
As of today, this is the common and standard procedure in the industry for health monitoring and disease outbreak detection in commercial flocks of poultry.
In many poultry diseases, such as Coccidiosis, respiratory diseases and others, a vast damage is inflicted on the farmer and that damage increases daily until the disease is detected, identified and properly treated. Late detection of the disease might lead (in severe cases) even to a total destruction of the entire group. The well known “Avian flue” (or bird's flu) is a good example of the vast damage inflicted on farmers once the disease is detected in a flock. Not only will the infected flock be destroyed, but other flocks in a radius of 3 km. as well. Direct damages of such single occurrence could accumulate to millions of dollars.
There are about 1.5 million commercial poultry houses (broilers, layers, turkeys, hatcheries and others) around the globe. Health costs of these flocks mounts to 10% of all production costs (costs of productivity reduction, consequential to morbidity are excluded), while mortality percentage in these flocks averages 4%-8%.
There is a need for new health monitoring concept and technology that will dramatically reduce these cost factors and may eventually bring about changes in veterinary regulations.
Similar limitations exist in other industries of livestock groups mentioned above.